Why bother? Local bureaucrats’ motivations for providing social assistance for refugees

ABSTRACT

What motivates bureaucrats to integrate refugees into welfare services even when they do not have any legal obligation to do so? How do they decide which services to include refugees and which not? Based on 61 semi-structured interviews with local municipal bureaucrats in Istanbul, and representatives of humanitarian agencies that collaborate with local municipalities I find that bureaucrats choose to cater different types of services to refugees depending on their motivation for extending services. Most municipal bureaucrats initiate cash, food, and in-kind goods transfers to refugees with extrinsic motivations – with the aspiration of appeasing the voters in their locality and protecting the mayor from a possible electoral backlash. Contrastingly, bureaucrats with professional motivations conduct needs assessments and initiate service and program development efforts in response to the specific needs of refugees in their municipalities. These findings are significant as they illustrate that local bureaucrats’ motivations for service extension play a great role in explaining the variation in types of services that refugees can access and terms and conditions of access. They also demonstrate that inclusive distributive behavior toward refugees does not always emanate from bureaucrats’ motivations of helping and benefiting refugee populations but can be instigated by extrinsic motivations.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• bureaucracy
• motivations
• municipality
• social assistance

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the Experiential Learning Fellowship at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University for supporting her while she conducted the fieldwork for this research. From the research design to the publication phase, this research was presented at many conferences and workshops including MPSA, APSA, ECPR, and many smaller workshops. The author is grateful for all the valuable feedback she received in different phases of research. Finally, the author wholeheartedly thanks Ezgi İrgil for her valuable comments and suggestions on the final draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Data is retrieved from the UNHCR Refugee Data Finder (2022).

2 The total size of the refugee population living in Istanbul is estimated to be 1,660,395 by the baseline assessment of Istanbul that was conducted in 2019 jointly by the International Organization for Migration and Turkey’s Presidency of Migration Management. This number includes Syrian refugees registered in Istanbul and registered in other provinces but living in Istanbul, refugees of other nationalities registered in Istanbul and registered in other provinces but living in Istanbul, and unregistered refugees.

3 Perry and Wise (1990) for instance differentiate between affective (altruistic) and norm-based (professional) motives.

4 Article 14 of the Municipality Law (2005) states that: ‘Municipal services shall be provided to citizens at the nearest possible locations and by the most appropriate methods.’ In contrast, Article 13 of the same law states that: ‘Everyone is a town(wo)man of the town in which s/he lives. Town(wo)men shall be entitled to take part in municipal decision making and services, receive information on municipal activities, and benefit from the aids distributed by the municipal administration.’ Basing their actions on the ‘fellow citizens’ clause in the law, some municipalities opt to provide social assistance for refugees (Erdogan 2017).

5 In Turkey, provinces with populations that are equal to or higher than 750,000 are designated as metropolitan provinces per the Municipality Law (2005) All metropolitan provinces have the two-tier municipal structure described above.

6 An extended discussion on the influence of politics on bureaucracies is beyond the scope of this paper. For more on the political-bureaucratic relations in the developing world and their impact on service delivery see the reviews by Dasandi and Esteve (2017) and Pepinsky, Pierskalla, and Sacks (2017).

7 In her study about discursive practices that street-level service providers in Turkey adopt when catering social services to refugees, Üstübici (2020) discusses the limits of the ‘religious hospitality’ narrative reinforced by the state and the party.

8 This is perhaps even more prevalent in Istanbul compared to other provinces in Turkey where the return of rent-seeking activities is highest and therefore electoral competition over mayoral seats is most intense.

9 Most of the time, national non-governmental organizations working on forced migration are funded by international humanitarian organizations. Thus, the conditionalities that they put forward for establishing partnerships are in general the same or very similar to the IOs.